From HRMS to Phoenix: Up from the Ashes

Abstract

The story of NASA and SETI begins with John Billingham, whose chapter (most appropriately) precedes mine. John was an RAF physician who worked on the Apollo missions to the moon, and came to the Life Sciences division at NASA Ames research center in Mountain View, CA. There, he became interested in SETI. In 1970, he invited Barney Oliver, then Vice President of Research and Development at Hewlett Packard, to head up a summer engineering study called Project Cyclops. The goal of Project Cyclops was to design a system to detect Earth-level technology at a distance of 1000 light years.